Thou Sleep'st so Sound
by Delenasfangirl
Summary: Sometime during early Season 4, Elena finds herself experimenting with dreamwalking. This is a really short drabble, but I had to get it out.


_"Thus fortified I might take my rest in peace. But dreams come through stone walls, light up dark rooms, or darken light ones, and their persons make their exists and their entrances as they please, and laugh at locksmiths."-Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu_

* * *

Elena, half-asleep, rolled over and bumped into the warm, gently heaving body that had recently taken up the right side of her bed every night.

Damon's face was flushed and his thick, long eyelashes were fluttering subtly above his high cheekbones. She smiled and wrapped her leg around him, carefully, so not to wake him. The lips that had only recently stopped taunting her curved up in a momentary smile, only to be immediately replaced with a crinkled, worried brow that disappeared as quickly as it came. She could tell he was dreaming, and her heart tugged in her chest, knowing the pain that was always brewing under the surface.

She hoped the small smile was because the dream was a good one, but from the way Damon had been tossing the past few nights, the outlook wasn't good.

She rested her head on his chest and his arm wrapped around her instinctively. She closed her eyes, and breathed in his spicy scent, wishing she could know what he was dreaming about.

Suddenly, she felt the pull of a hazy image that engulfed her mind. Surprised, she flashed her eyes open, cutting off whatever it was she was seeing. What was that? It definitely hadn't come from her imagination. It had felt so unnatural, so foreign.

Elena was more awake now, and she reminded herself that as a vampire, she had the potential to know a person's dreams. This new realization tantalized her with possibilities.

She hesitated. Those were Damon's private thoughts, she didn't want to intrude on his mind like that, knowing how private he was. Then again, that's what made it so tempting. Elena could ask him any question she wanted, she knew that, but she also knew that Damon was biased against himself, and she never got a truly just answer from him. Besides, she was always too scared to ask him anything that might expose too much of his pain, afraid of what his answer might be, even more afraid of the possibility of his walls shooting up as they so often did.

Elena smirked to herself, it would be payback for all of the times he listened in on her dreaming when she was human, and admittedly, there was a small bit of pride in hoping that he might be dreaming about her. The thought made her stomach tingle.

So, she settled back into Damon's chest and repeated the process. A deep breath in, a small kiss to his neck, and she willed herself into Damon's thoughts.

Damon was a lot older than her, so infiltrating his mind wasn't so easy, much less influencing whatever it was his mind was twisting.

The images were blurry at first, a collection of floating colors and whispered, far away sounds—clanking glasses, howling wind, the occasional blank face. Then, the dream began to sharpen. She recognized the scent of blood, heard her name being shouted with desperation and the screeching of tires that descended into a huge, watery splash.

Soon, she found herself standing over Alaric, whose weakened body was slumped against a wall in a candle-lit tomb. There were tears in his eyes and he whispered, "Is this the part where you give me a dream?"

Elena's heart sank. Damon never told her about this, she didn't know if it was a mere dream, or a gut-wrenching and true memory. Either way, the thought of him with Alaric in his last moments hurt Elena in ways for which she had no words. She ached for Alaric in ways she thought only she could understand, forgetting, sometimes, that sometimes Alaric knew parts of Damon that not even Elena was privy to.

In his dream, Elena watched as the scene changed and Damon hunched himself in front of Alaric's grave, in a position that was almost prayerful. "Please," he begged, "I'm sorry. You didn't deserve this, you shouldn't have died. Not like that, not the way you did."

The scene switched to the Gilbert living room, where there was a game of Pictionary going on and Damon was drawing frantically on a white board, as Jenna and Alaric laughed on the couch. There was almost a halo radiating from Jenna's head as she cried, "You Ain't Nothin' but a Hound Dog!"

It was a melancholy moment that jumped almost immediately to Alaric's face, and his voice pleading the name, "Jenna?" only to be followed by heartbreak as he learned of her death.

The focus suddenly turned to Elena, her face as white as a ghost's, lying on a couch. She watched as Damon stood over her, cradling the back of her neck, the setting switching to a hospital room, then her bedroom, then his. She lay, fixated on his face, contorted with pain as he lifted his hand from her torso and found it dripping with blood.

Then she watched as the life drained from her body and a pool of scarlet pervaded his white sheets.

The dream started blackening around the edges as she heard his scream of agony, "Nooooooooooooooooo!"

Damon awoke frantically, his whole body was tensed for panic, until he felt a pair of strong arms wrapped around him and the soft, hushing noises coming from Elena. Living, undead Elena. She was fine, she was in his bed, in his arms, whispering something soothing, "shhh, it's okay, it was just a bad dream." Her voice cracked and he realized that she had tears moving aimlessly down her face.

He settled back into his pillow and tightened his arms around her.

He cleared his throat, "Elena," he began with a husky voice, "were you dreamwalking?"

He was met with silence. Guilty silence, and arms gripping him more firmly.

He lifted her chin to face him, the sunshine played in her hair and highlighted her glistening eyes. He didn't really know what to say to her, there was an overwhelming amount of sympathy in her eyes, sympathy that, while warmed his heart, also made him a little uncomfortable. She had seen how scared he was of her death, when she was supposed to be able to depend on him for optimism in their seemingly day-to-day grapples with death.

So, instead of saying anything, he pressed a kiss to her salty mouth, finally whispering "I'm sorry you had to see that, Elena."

She shook her head and cupped his face, "No, no Damon. It's okay." She didn't have words either, there hardly ever was apt language between the two of them. So instead, she wrapped herself around his body, willing him to feel safe, "we're okay."

They lay there, in their bed as day stirred around them.

* * *

The writing inspiration doesn't really strike any longer, especially since I lost all of my plans and drafts for "Renaissance" because of my computer, but when it does, I've got to take advantage. I hope you liked it. I miss you guys!


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